Exploring the link between molecular cloud ices and chondritic organic matter in laboratory

Abstract

Carbonaceous meteorites are fragments of asteroids rich in organic material. In the forming solar nebula, parent bodies may have accreted organic materials resulting from the evolution of icy grains observed in dense molecular clouds. The major issues of this scenario are the secondary processes having occurred on asteroids, which may have modified the accreted matter. Here, we explore the evolution of organic analogs of protostellar/protoplanetary disk material once accreted and submitted to aqueous alteration at 150 °C. The evolution of molecular compounds during up to 100 days is monitored by high resolution mass spectrometry. We report significant evolution of the molecular families, with the decreases of H/C and N/C ratios. We find that the post-aqueous products share compositional similarities with the soluble organic matter of the Murchison meteorite. These results give a comprehensive scenario of the possible link between carbonaceous meteorites and ices of dense molecular clouds.

An open source computational workflow for the discovery of autocatalytic networks in abiotic reactions

“…This maturation effect has been shown to produce interesting self-organizational properties in glucose-ammonia reactions, 50 and has been noted recently in experimental molecular cloud analog maturation experiments. 51 …”

Science Drivers for the Future Exploration of Ceres: From Solar System Evolution to Ocean World Science

“…In addition, in some specific CC meteorites, such as CI, CM, CR, and the ungrouped Tagish Lake (e.g., Pizzarello et al 2001;Pizzarello & Holmes 2009), the relative abundance of amino acids decreases with an increasing degree of aqueous alteration, indicating that this process altered the OM (Glavin et al 2010). Alternatively, aqueous alteration might also redistribute the initial molecular composition and allow the formation of new species (Vinogradoff et al 2017;Danger et al 2021). In contrast, thermal metamorphism has a more destructive effect on the OM and leads mainly to the graphitization and decrease of OM diversity (e.g., Kebukawa 2011).…”

“…Laboratory studies have also shown that organic molecules (e.g., tholins, chondritic organics) are transformed in aqueous alteration experiments (Kebukawa et al 2013(Kebukawa et al , 2020Brassé et al 2017;Vinogradoff et al 2018;Danger et al 2021), producing numerous new soluble molecules and insoluble OM as a function of time and temperature. The nature and extent of OM evolution likely depends on the nature of the initial molecules, the interaction with minerals, and the fluid properties (Gil-Lozano et al 2020;Haas et al 2020;Vinogradoff et al 2020).…”

Methanol in the RNA world: An astrochemical perspective

“…The interstellar medium witnesses many astrophysical events including meteorite impacts with celestial bodies. Studies showed that a significant portion of soluble organic matter observed in carbonaceous meteorites can indeed originate from organic ices, derived from dense molecular clouds (Danger et al, 2021). For example, laboratory impact experiments showed that glycolaldehyde found in the ISM, as well as glycolaldehyde mixed with montmorillonite clay, when subjected to reverberated shocks (~5 to >25 GPa), resulted in the formation of a mixture of important biologically significant molecules such as ethylene glycol, threose, and erythrose (McCaffrey et al, 2014).…”